


i'm always true to you in my fashion

by butforthegrace



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genre: Emotional Baggage, F/M, Infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-09
Updated: 2011-09-09
Packaged: 2017-10-23 14:03:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/251118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butforthegrace/pseuds/butforthegrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Daisy doesn’t like emotion.  She doesn’t trust it.</i><br/>Pre-book.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'm always true to you in my fashion

“I’m sorry, my hair looks a mess,” she says, apologizing with easy humor as they stand just before her door; she won’t leave until her fingers have smoothed that frizz down and it might be a while yet.  
   
“It looks lovely,” he says, without her humor.  He’s looking at her scalp, at the white part between her dark strands of hair, and he says it like he means it.  It frightens her.  His intensity always has: everything he says to her, he says like it’s God’s own truth, and for a girl surrounded by flash and glamour and people who don’t mean a word of what they say, to have someone so close who says everything so seriously is terrifying.  
   
Daisy doesn’t like emotion.  She doesn’t trust it.  She is far fonder of a bouquet of flowers than the simple words that accompany it; she would rather Jay give her a diamond ring than tell her, so intensely, so seriously, fixing her with a gaze that makes her squirm, that he loves her.  
   
She tells him she loves him too, of course.  But she doesn’t know if she does; and then when later she settles on the idea that she is indeed in love with Jay Gatsby, she’s aware all the while that it’s a shallow kind of love, and she doesn’t  _want_  to love him.  Loving Jay Gatsby is loving the tide.  He is not stable, he is not a rock; he tries to be one for her, but once he leaves for the war, Daisy has never been more alone.  But she trusts him.  She writes him letters, despairing, begging him to tell her that she is doing the right thing by waiting for him.  (He doesn’t know that she still sees other men while he is gone.  She won’t tell him.  If he comes home and marries her it won’t matter, because they will be together, and if they never marry—well, what will it matter then?)  
   
She likes this life of impermanence, of falling asleep at dawn with her evening dress tangled between her limbs, of dancing all night and keeping half a dozen dates with half a dozen men during the day.  Even Jay fits neatly into this life—she waits for his letters, full of the grand romantic gestures he promises to make when he returns from the war, though she grows less certain with each day that he’ll return.  She grows less certain that she wants him to.  
   
She learns again and again why she doesn’t trust emotion; this love for him, however shallow, is breaking her heart.  When he left she’d cried for hours, and then wiped her face and put on make-up and went out to dance.  She tells men not to expect anything of her, that she has a beau over in France, but they expect things of her all the same and it’s tearing at her.   Everyone wants all of beautiful Daisy Fay, but instead of settling for nothing they steal pieces from her, and with every piece goes certainty that waiting for Jay is right.  Her letters grow more desperate with each month, and he tries to reassure her but he can’t.  She forgets why she loves him.  She just half-remembers the specter of him, and her promise to him fades like the morning dew.  
   
All that’s left, by the time Tom Buchanan arrives, is a stack of yellowing letters from France, bearing Daisy’s name in elegant script.  The day she meets Tom, a cold spring morning, she throws them into the fire and doesn’t look back.


End file.
